It’s been said that the average person living today—especially in wealthy countries—will enjoy a better overall quality of life than an emperor living a few hundred years ago, and I tend to think that’s true.
Average life- and health-spans have dramatically increased even since the mid-20th century, and the portfolio of conveniences, understandings, entertainments, rights, and other baseline benefits we enjoy simply for having been born in the right place and time is astounding when considered within the total context of human history.
Not all change is positive, of course, and we collectively experience plenty of semi-regular backsliding. There are also changes that are “good” in one sense and “pretty dang terrible” in another, and I would argue that the majority of our social and communication infrastructure moving online, and the subsequent prioritization of engagement metrics over all others, falls into that latter category.
This isn’t universally the case, and there are degrees of engagement that are more healthful than harmful. Just as allowing oneself to periodically eat fast food rather than strictly adhering to a lifestyle-defining, nutritionally perfect diet 100% of the time can be beneficial, it could likewise be argued that occasional, moderated exposure to TikTok dance videos and Instagram puppy memes is actually not so bad, and possibly even better than zero exposure to such things.
When taken to extremes, though, even the most innocuous-seeming apps and platforms can be deleterious to our health. And because of the powerful incentives that shape these pseudo-social online spaces, and the ease with which we can experience them (compared to comparable experiences in the real world) we’re more likely to engage with them in extreme and unhealthful—rather than periodic, not-so-bad, maybe even on-balance good—ways.
Real life is a lot messier and more frictional than online socialization, and interacting with other human beings is a lot more complex, stressful, and at times anxiety-inducing than engaging with online content.
You can’t like-and-subscribe your way into a friendship, and experiencing the full range of human emotion with another person who has an inner-life just as rich as your own requires effortful thought and communication that’s more dense and elaborate than a reaction emoji.
If social media is the fast food of human interaction, real-life exposure to other human beings is a complex, home-made meal.
Buying and consuming a box of chicken nuggets is casually simple to the point of being utterly thoughtless. Orchestrating a kitchen full of ingredients into a delicious, subtle, dietarily rich final product can seem like a ridiculously heavy lift in comparison.
But even though our internal reward systems love the salts, fats, and sugars of ultra-processed snack foods, we’re only really fueled, at a deeper level, by the weightier stuff: by hugs, not nuggs.
I don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with the periodic cheat-food, and I think it’s possible to become so obsessed with a type of anti-technology purity that we miss out on really stellar memes and harmless, superficial interactions that might serve as the right anxiety-easing brain-snack at the right moment.
But these lighter-weight, nutritionally vacant options are best served as irregular additions to lives enriched by the deeper, hard-earned and more eudemonia-inducing stuff that ideally makes up the foundation of our diets, dialogues, and lives.
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